#Aperture 3.5 intel professional#
#Aperture 3.5 intel free#

White backgrounds are ubiquitous in electronics: see SparkFun for example. This is a matter of personal taste and style, but I found that there are minor pros and cons for each. When taking pictures of PCBs, you typically have two options for a background: black or white. This setup is simple, solid, self-contained and easy to move around, which perfect in our small garage lab. The led panels are directly plugged into the wall and can be switched on or off like a desk light. The picture below shows the assembly almost finalized. The led panels produce diffused light and are placed on each side of a square box. I built mine with 2 cheap outdoor square led panels and some scrap wood. There are plenty of tutorials on the net for building a light box. The solution is to use a light box, which is typically a box made of a white translucent material which is illuminated from the outside in order to give objects inside the box uniform lighting (see here for an example). A strong directional light will often create shadows, hiding details of your PCB, such as pins or components. You want to reduce shadows as much as possible. To take pictures of PCBs or products in general, it's good to have a diffused soft light source that comes from all directions uniformly. Now we can walk through taking pictures of PCBs in 7 steps:ДЄll those steps may sound like a lot of work, but once you establish your routine, it just takes a few seconds to make a shot and a few more minutes with GIMP before you can upload your new project picture to your favorite website.

#Aperture 3.5 intel professional#

Warning: If you're an advanced photographer with professional lighting, macro lens and a studio, this article might hurt your eyes. Any advanced point-and-shoot camera that has a zoom should work just as well.

#Aperture 3.5 intel free#

GIMP, the free and open-source image editor.

My recommended setup has only 3 elements:

You can follow Alain at his website as well as Twitter and Github. Guest author Alain Pannetrat is a self-described digital electronic fanatic who is currently working on an open-source/open-hardware Arduino-compatible IoT platform based on CAN-bus. However, if you want repeatable quality and acceptable color, you don't need to break the bank but you will need a bit more gear. Sure, you can take pictures of PCBs with your smartphone and get nice results.

I've started to develop a strange pleasure for taking pictures of PCBs and I thought I'd share my experience. I've been taking pictures of circuits as part of the (now defunct) Omzlo One Kickstarter and the new follow-up 'Skware' CAN-bus IoT project we are building.